


An enormous surprise to everyone

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Background Relationships, Books, Dysfunctional Family, Future Fic, Gen, Reading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-07
Updated: 2015-07-07
Packaged: 2018-04-08 04:06:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4290195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>...or perhaps not such an enormous surprise after all. Fob has a vocabulary question, and a revelation ensues.</p><p>*</p><p>Note: canon-typical levels of family dysfunctionality.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An enormous surprise to everyone

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [Antonia_Forest_Fanworks_2015](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Antonia_Forest_Fanworks_2015) collection. 



> **Prompt:**  
>  (I don't know where this one came from, this is about as cracky as I get.)  
> During their later cadet years, Peter and Selby become lovers as well as best friends. Peter brings Selby back to Trennels with him for the winter holiday before their last term(s) at Dartmouth.

Normally, Fob would have asked Kay. Kay was bad for some things, like the car and pudding, but she was good with words: she understood that you couldn’t go looking them up in the dictionary until you knew how to spell them, or at least what order the first couple of letters came in. Daddy had to have that explained to him every time. But Kay, she felt, wasn’t the person for this particular question; she didn’t know why, it just felt ticklish somehow, and she had learned that things with a ticklish feel were best kept quiet about, in case they provoked Daddy’s shouting, Chas’s bright silly chatter, Rose’s abrupt departure for her bedroom, or Karen looking as if there was a war on and the news had just said England had lost it.

After lunch Chas darted out for his bicycle and pedalled madly away towards Westbridge to resume whatever he’d been doing with Barry. Why did boys his age ride everywhere in top gear? She would draw a cartoon of that, she decided, with his legs in a blur even though he was going downhill. Rose excused herself punctiliously and returned to her bedroom to continue her progress through the knee-high pile of books that was her Christmas booty. 

‘And what are your plans for the afternoon?’ Karen asked, not in a talking-down grown-up way, but as if she were talking to one of the mothers at the school gate. Fob liked her for that. She shrugged. 

‘Oh. Not back over―well, I suppose that’s for the best. I thought I might try Queen of Puddings for this evening. Would you care to supervise?’ 

That wouldn’t exactly be disagreeable. ‘Mm, all right. Can I draw you while you cook?’ 

‘Only if you promise it’ll be warts and all.’ 

‘You don’t have any warts. But I'll put some on if you want them.’ 

‘ _Not_ necessary, I think.’ Karen ran a hand over her hair and smiled. Most of the time they got on all right. 

On the way upstairs for her pencil case and sketchbook, Fob remembered the word and hesitated. Before she could think better of it, she turned down the little passage to Rose’s room. 

Rose came to the door at her knock. She looked― _watercolourish_ , Fob thought, having recently made her first attempts in that frustratingly indelible medium. But she couldn’t possibly have been crying. Everything had been fine since the row about the roasting-tin on Christmas Eve, which had, admittedly, been a humdinger. 

‘What is it?’ said Rose, teenage and elderly. 

‘Can I ask you something?’ 

Rose sagged a bit, and half-turned back to the bed, on which, just below the round window, lay a book with a pink and black cover. 

‘Just a word.’ 

‘All right. Come in.’ Unimportant queries about vocabulary didn’t usually get you invited into what Daddy, with a curl of his lip that Fob had yet to capture to her satisfaction, called Rose’s _sanctum sanctorum_. Then Fob realised what she’d said, and deciding that it wasn’t worth trying to explain, climbed onto the end of the bed. That was probably cheek, because Rose didn’t sit at the other end but stood over her, arms folded. 

‘It really was a word I meant,’ Fob said, looking up brazenly. ‘What one means, I mean.’ 

Rose rolled her eyes. ‘What word?’ 

‘Chaperones.’ 

‘Chaperone? It’s like―the adults at a party.’ 

That made no sense at all, and Fob’s face must have shown it. 

‘You know when you were―a bit littler than you are now, and you went to a birthday party? And most of the mothers left, because you weren’t _that_ little? But one or two stayed about to help with the games and if―if someone got upset―’ Rose looked quickly at her clean nails. 

‘Yep.’ 

‘Well, back before the First World War, grown-up people’s parties sort of had a version of that.’ 

‘ _Why_?’ said Fob, incredulous at the thought of these frail ancestors, who might be provoked to shameful exhibitions by a sinister magician or defeat at musical chairs. 

‘Because people thought it was improper―not decent―for unmarried young ladies to be alone with young men.’ 

Oh, Fob thought, _kissing_. It did make sense of a sort now. As she made to slide down from the bed it struck her that Rose wasn’t as moody as she’d been a few months ago: in the summer she probably would just have told Fob to get lost in a muffly way through her closed door. Earnestly, she made an effort at interest in Rose-type things, which really, honestly, couldn’t be duller. 

‘Is it a good book?’ She nodded towards it. The picture on the jacket had been made by shading a black circle around the figure of a man bending to throw ears of wheat on the ground, like a reverse silhouette. Fob added it to her mental list of things to try. 

‘Super, thanks.’ 

‘What’s it about?’ 

‘Ancient―ancient Greece.’ 

Fob saw now that the book cover was meant to be like a Greek vase, and there was actually a vase on the spine. Ancient Greece had been last year's Project. Miss Halliday had laughed in a very peculiar way at Fob’s picture of Hercules cleaning the impossibly dirty stable, which was Peter in a monstrous bate because Rowan had caught him for chores before he could slope off. A lot of her imaginary pictures were Peter, and she sensed people somehow thought that was―not improper, not _not decent_ , and certainly nothing to do with kissing, but something that Fob ought to be growing out of. Well, she was. Starting this afternoon. 

She said quickly, ‘Like Jason and the Argonauts and stuff?’ 

‘No―real historical people. It’s about politics and philosophy―and―friendship, I suppose.’ 

Fob looked at her in open dismay. Rose grinned back. She wouldn’t have done that in the summer, either. ‘You’ll understand when you’re older,’ she said, but in a friendly, sarcastic way that meant she knew how annoying it was to be told that. ‘Fob―do you mind me asking―where’d you read “chaperone”?’ 

‘Didn’t read. Heard someone say it.’ 

‘Oh.’ Clearly curious, Rose was yet too polite and private to ask, and Fob felt in response a novel sensation: something between appreciativeness and pity. She said, ‘Selby. He and Peter were talking about a girl they like, I think.’ She stood up to do Selby, which she was aware was actually Lawrie-doing-Selby, but it still made people laugh. ‘ _She’s quite adorable, don’t get me wrong, but you must agree it gives one an inside into how_ ―’ 

‘Insight, I think,’ Rose murmured. 

‘ _―how Victorian debutantes must have felt about their chaperones_. I know _debutante_. Kay’s Aunt Molly was one but her mum wasn’t. But I thought a chaperone might be a sort of hat, or something.’ 

She’d obviously done a better Selby than usual, because Rose sank down onto the bed, hand clamped tight over her mouth, eyes popping. Deeply gratified, Fob gathered her pencils and sketchbook. Turning with her hand on the doorknob to see her sister still breathless, a judder of alarm passed through her, because Rose’s uncontrollable laughter was so much like her tears―but it was okay, she _was_ laughing. 

‘Calm yü down, Rosie m’dear,' she remarked genially, ‘B’ain’t that bloody funny, loike.’

**Author's Note:**

> Set Since The War, in flexible Marlowverse time, but for those who prefer accuracy where they can get it, I was imagining four years after the events of _Run Away Home_ , but on the _Ready Made Family_ timeline, so in the early 1970s.
> 
> The title quotes the Marlows' reaction to Selby's agreeable demeanour, as recorded in _The Marlows and the Traitor_.
> 
> Rose is reading Mary Renault's novel _The Last of the Wine_. The jacket described is that of the first edition, published in 1956. In my imagination it's a gift from a stony-broke Nicola, fortuitously picked up from the bargain box on Colebridge Market's second-hand bookstall.


End file.
